Professional Machinima

The Professional Machinima research project builds on the strengths of machinima by blurring the lines between it and Hollywood-quality 3D animation. It looks to create a platform for broadcast, HD-quality, Machinima as well as the tools to create a “virtual studio” to support it.

Benefits:

• Real-time filming and rendering of broadcast-quality animation
• Applications in commercials, TV, film, computer game cut-scenes and web-based promotions or multimedia presentations
• Leverages cutting-edge, but consumer-level game software
• Leverages the work of an active modding scene, which constantly creates more content and tools for these game-software packages
• Does not require the massive render farms of most modern broadcast-quality 3D-animation
• Will allow cheap and easily edited pre-visualisation for live-action filming presenting a flexible and re-usable path through story boarding, blocking and promotional shorts

Status: In development.

Why Machinima?

Machinima uses the ever more beautiful worlds and characters of modern computer games to “film” animated movies, where the characters act things out in real-time and never need stunt doubles. Going from a small underground hobby it has now grown to the point where you can buy DVDs of machinima at video libraries (if your video library is a good one, and the machinima happens to be the ground breaking Red vs. Blue).
The appeal of Machinima is obvious. It is very cheap to produce and can be made on home computers with very little extra equipment. Where modern 3D animation techniques require scenes to be sent away for days or hours as rooms full of computers render them, machinima can be shot in real-time allowing the speed and spontaneity of live-action filming.
Using the user-content creation tools that are becoming standard with block-buster computer games, fledging film makers can take their audiences to new worlds, where almost anything is possible. By playing with shader options and rendering methods, they can even give their movies a look and tone that is very different from the game that forms the stage for their screenplay.

Under the hood of Professional Machinima

Many computer games are designed for computer hardware that does not exist when it is released. After about six months, it is only now that commercial PCs are reliably able to play Crysis at its full level of detail with respectable frame-rates. This means that high-definition, and visually stunning machinima is very possible, and it is possible to still shoot it in real-time. All you need is a machine that is powerful enough. This poses a problem, because these games are designed for desk-tops not supercomputers. Even graphics-workstations used for rendering 3D animated films like Happy Feet or Finding Nemo are not configured for games in the same way high-end game machines are.

Power to the People

Our solution is to create a software platform that allows high-power computing to be effectively used with games software to create extremely-high qualify machinima. It would combine an increase in visual quality, with the ability to still shoot in real-time, using what is otherwise consumer-level software.
This has applications not only for film makers looking to produce machinima films with wide-ranging appeal and commercial applications, but it would also have flow on benefits for advertising, web animations and the computer game industry.

Beyond Animation

Producing high-quality machinima is only one application of the Super Machinima tool platform. Beyond the super-charged rendering pipeline, Binary Culture also intends to create an entire pre-visualisation pathway for the technology, allowing professional pre-production and planning stages to be applied to Super Machinima projects.

Story Boarding and blocking

Begin by story-boarding with scanned 2D art. It could sit in the rough 3D space pasted onto blocks which rotate to keep the picture facing the camera. It’s simple but gives you all of the blocking you need.

Pre-vis

As you get into pre-visualisation you could replace the place-holder blocks with rough 3D models to give a better impression of what you have planned (or to impress possible cast-mates or investors).

Filming the performance

You could then use all of the work you have laid down and up-rez it again (use higher resolution models or models with more details turned on to “shoot”) and then use motion-capture technology to replace key animations, or, in fact shoot it all in real-time mo-capturing all of the action. Do it on a sound stage , and you could record the dialogue at the same time, capturing a complete performance.

Taking it Live

Obviously, this technology has applications beyond shooting animated films, and the speed and flexibility of the tools it offers in preproduction would be just as at-home in live-action film making, giving an easily scalable path that can set scenes, test angles, block in action to prepare for an efficient filming schedule, not to mention offering the ability to polished this pre-vis material for promotional web-projects or teasers, or just to help sell the idea to possible investors.

Super Contribution

Professional Machinima takes the tools of the next wave of underground film-making and prepares them for primetime — giving indie filmmakers greater reach and professional studios, advertising agencies and game designers a new set of tools which can not only make their current work more efficient, but also offer a whole new path to animated content.